CHAPTER 7

The Ethics of Synthetic Biology

In 2010, one of the most well-known scientists and entrepreneurs on the planet made international news in announcing his creation of a “synthetic organism.” Craig Venter, already famous for beating the United States government’s Human Genome Project in the race to sequence the human genome, had already founded the for-profit gene company Celera Genomics in 1998.

Celera, which in 2011 became a subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics, sounds a lot like the Dyad Corporation (which, similarly, appears to be a subsidiary of shadow corporation Topside) in Orphan Black. From top to bottom, Celera and Quest aim to make money from knowledge of genomics, especially the new medical field of personalized genomics, where diagnosis and treatment are tailored to your individual genetic profile (presumably a specificity for which you or your insurance company is willing to pay).

Venter also founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a nonprofit think tank employing more than four hundred people who analyze ethical and policy implications of genetic research. This sounds a little like Harry H. Laughlin’s nonprofit Station for Experimental Evolution, which championed the notorious eugenics movement in North America in the early twentieth century (more about this in chapter eight), especially since it is hard to believe that the profit-minded Venter would fund analyses of policies that could hurt Celera or Quest.

Now, in 2010, Venter claimed to have made something that had never existed before in nature: a completely artificial, or rather synthetic, cell, which he named “Synthia.” Rather than being inherited from a previously living cell, the cell’s DNA code was created by Venter. Venter’s work has a way of grabbing everyone’s attention, and his announcement that he had created Synthia led many to wonder if this wasn’t another biological boundary crossing.

The term synthetic biology, or SynBio, can refer to everything from putting a new gene into a potato to creating biological life out of chemicals; the exact definition is up for debate. But for our purposes, we will use the phrase to mean the deliberate introduction of genes to create life forms that did not naturally arise through evolution. Under this definition, the Ledas and Castors are instances of SynBio.

FOUR FRAMES FOR THINKING ABOUT BIOTECHNOLOGY

Ethics around SynBio are just as contested as the term’s precise definition. But there are four philosophical frames that can help us think more clearly about SynBio’s ethical implications, in Orphan Black and in general: naturalism, globalism, transhumanism, and egalitarianism.

A frame in the philosophical sense is a specific viewpoint that dictates the way one thinks about a subject or the kind of questions one asks. Using frames allows us to understand particular ethical issues in their larger, sometimes opposing, contexts. Frames can also help us understand where, philosophically, some of the characters in Orphan Black are coming from.

Naturalists such as the Prolethean Gracie believe that human societies have strayed too far from traditional forms of living. They cherish environmental purity and yearn to leave Earth as our forefathers inherited it. They believe biological engineering should be resisted, especially if it violates natural norms, creates strange hybrids, and upsets Mother Nature. Naturalists want to keep humanity pure. They fear Jurassic Park and oppose bringing back woolly mammoths. To naturalists, the Ledas and Castors are unnatural freaks, things that should be abhorred.

Globalists such as (we assume) the executives of Topside and the Dyad Institute believe that a rising sea lifts all boats. Strong economies, not moral passion, raise standards of living. In the long run, free world trade, specialization, investment of capital, and economies of scale help more people than international aid. They believe that protecting breakthroughs in biotech with patents will motivate scientists to create things that benefit everyone, the way Apple and Google have. To ensure fairness, countries must enforce laws about intellectual property and not allow people to steal from other countries.

Naturalist Gracie would despise the globalist attitude of turning nature into private property. According to real-life naturalist and activist Vandana Shiva, “The patenting and ownership of life forms is ethically [wrong] . . . When a pig or cow is simply treated as bioreactor, for instance, to produce a certain kind of chemical for the pharmaceutical industry, it can be re-engineered and redesigned without any ethical constraint.”

Transhumanists such as Dr. Aldous Leekie believe that science can solve all human problems and that biotechnology not only can, but has a duty to, improve human life, both by eliminating inherited diseases and by creating better people. For them, genetic engineering creates safer medicines, healthier foods, and cures for infertility. Science will ultimately solve all problems if Luddites such as Tomas can be overcome. For transhumanists, a tool is a tool is a tool, and it is the people who use them that are good or bad. Cloning, whether of humans or mammoths, is a tool and can be used for good or evil purposes just like a hammer or a gun. Topside and Dyad seem to have bad motives for cloning Ledas and Castors, but other people could have good motives.

For example, Venter, the ultimate transhumanist, believes that Synthia could help cure diseases and feed the planet, though naturalist and egalitarian critics doubt that, even if he has really created a totally artificial living cell, its use will benefit most people rather than rich corporations investing in biotech. Naturalists also argue that Synthia is dangerous, because it has qualities that did not develop, as every other kind of cell did, via evolution, and hence have not been tested by Nature.

Egalitarians such as Kira’s father, Cal Morrison, believe that the world’s problem is not lack of scientific knowledge, but injustice. For Cal and other egalitarians, everything about patenting life forms, whether a genetically modified tomato, a cloned cat, or a Leda with a patent tag, favors organizations like Topside and Dyad—in other words, Big Pharma, Big Biotech, and the top 1 percent.

Cal would dismiss the claims that markets naturally lift everyone in a rising sea or that biotechnology will help the average person. Rather, egalitarians believe corporations such as Monsanto will use biotechnology to maximize profits and exploit the poor. Biotech will make the world more unequal, not less. For example, Monsanto genetically modifies plants for herbicide resistance. This concentrates Monsanto’s control of agriculture because crops that remain vulnerable to the herbicides cannot be grown in fields nearby Monsanto’s.

EXAMPLES OF SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY AS SEEN THROUGH THE FOUR FRAMES

Since 2010, synthetic biology has exploded, worrying naturalists and egalitarians.

For example, scientists have genetically modified pigs to produce manure with less phosphorus, a chemical whose release into waterways causes algae to bloom and clog the surface. But to make pigs produce less environmentally damaging manure, scientists had to insert genes from a mouse and the E. coli bacteria into pig embryos, creating what some naturalists call “Frankenswine.” To naturalists, this was a border crossing, a violation of the natural.

Scientists’ efforts to raise pigs with less harm to the environment are ostensibly something naturalists would like, except that naturalists also oppose the gigantic pig factories that create the problem—an unethical, unnatural way of raising pigs, versus raising them free range—and hence oppose solutions that make it easier to keep those factories in business. Similarly, naturalists oppose Frozen Zoo, a nonprofit project that freezes embryos of endangered species for later possible implantation. Naturalists prefer to focus on preventing loss of habitat rather than high-tech solutions to loss of species due to habitat destruction.

In Canada, scientists genetically altered dairy cows to be 75 percent less gaseous, drastically reducing the methane gas that contributes to global warning. And as with the gene-altered pigs, you would think naturalists would like this, but again, they do not, because they favor organic dairies, milk without added hormones, and genetically unmodified cows over industrial dairy farming.

Of course, egalitarians oppose the alterations to both types of livestock, because they believe such changes make it easier for Big Agribusiness to treat animals like commodities.

Another biotech company, Nexia Biotechnologies, inserted into the DNA of goats a gene responsible for making web material in spiders, resulting in bioengineered milk with proteins that can be turned into amazingly strong fibers called “BioSteel.” For egalitarians, this was another example of scientists plundering nature for profits, the way Shaman Pharmaceuticals controversially sent anthropologists in the late 1990s to cozy up to shamans in South America to steal and patent their secret plants and cures.

Similarly, AquaBounty, a for-profit genetics company, genetically modified salmon to grow twice as fast as normal. Naturalists opposed the release of such salmon into the wild, worried that the genetically modified salmon would drive out natural salmon, but the FDA approved sales of such fish in 2015.

Researchers have also inserted small bits of hepatitis B and cholera genes into bananas, so that the people in developing countries eating these bananas can be easily vaccinated. But that project has gone nowhere—and egalitarians would argue that’s because no one can discover how to make money doing it.

As a last example, scientists in Washington State genetically engineered poplar trees to have roots that soaked up 90 percent of environmental trichloroethylene, a toxic chemical found in the soil of hazardous waste sites, beating ordinary poplars, which absorb only 3 percent. Of course, they patented these GM poplars and hope to make big money selling them to the federal government to clean up these sites.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY AND ORPHAN BLACK

So what does all this mean for Orphan Black?

In the show’s science fiction world, Projects Leda and Castor scientists seem to have used some synthetic biology in the human clones, especially for their DNA tags and maybe other things we don’t yet know about. Indeed, this revolutionary technology probably explains the extraordinary healing qualities of Kira, Helena, and Sarah. We see in Aldous Leekie how transhumanists think that the new technology sketched in the show might have good uses.

Naturalists see things differently. In all her natural innocence, Gracie is powerfully repulsed by the idea of clones, feeling that Helena is an abomination, and is shocked by the discovery that her husband, too, was a creation of science. Her ideas reflect our innate sense of wrongness about humans meddling with nature, genes, and the very things that make us human.

Naturalists and egalitarians both worry about risks to the health of those working with synthetic organisms. Biocontainment is not a certain science. Also, organisms that escape or are deliberately released into the environment or into a human subject could wreak havoc if not properly controlled. The most serious fear of naturalists and egalitarians is that synthetic biology might provide powerful but unpredictable new tools for making living organisms into biological weapons.

In Orphan Black, the Castors portray both concerns. They are controlled by the military, having been trained as soldiers as a kind of biological weapon. But what is scarier is the information revealed about their condition—that their strange disease is transmissible. Under Coady’s fearsome control, there is, as Paul suggests, the possibility that the Castors’ disease could, in fact, be a bio-weapon. What if Dyad created a new batch of human clones—call them Victors—and infected them with the lethal virus of the film Contagion, then blackmailed the world to prevent the Victors’ release into the general population?

Egalitarians are of course also concerned with whether, if SynBio essentially manipulates the genetics of organisms for specific purposes, the development of such technology will promote just or unjust distributions of power and resources. The most basic research with SynBio raises questions about justice for those involved—not only for those who work in labs creating SynBio, but also anyone in a medical trial as a research subject. The Ledas and Castors are unconsenting subjects to their experimental origins and unconsenting subjects of the ongoing monitoring of their lives.

There are also justice concerns about the downstream consequences of SynBio. Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, an eighty-five-mile stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, is famous for the environmental harm of its many chemical plants and oil refineries. It’s also called the Cancer Corridor due to its demonstrated effects on its residents. Most of the people who live here are poor and black—an example of environmental racism, which occurs when one racial group disproportionally suffers harm from such environmental conditions.

Will SynBio lead to a similar “biological racism”? Will poor people, and especially poor minorities, be left out of, say, the race for biologically superior children through genetic engineering? Will “equality of opportunity” become the opportunity of biologically “normal” children to line up at the starting line of life, only to be quickly left behind by newly created Superior Children?

SynBio might also lead to the elimination of the means of livelihood of people in developing countries. Before relations thawed with America, every Cuban village had a public phone and a person who made a living relaying messages from that phone. Now new cell phone towers are being built, allowing everyone to have an affordable cell phone, but destroying a major occupation in Cuba. In the same way, huge monocrops of soybeans, corn, and rice are destroying family farms around the world, rendering them obsolete and inefficient.

One concern very apparent in Orphan Black centers on the ownership of and control over SynBio. With patents embedded into their very DNA, the clones of Castor and Leda are, to Topside at least, mere biological possessions— investments to be traded on commodity exchanges or used as weapons by the military.

Egalitarians worry about Big Pharma—corporations— being able to dictate the terms of use for SynBio, much as Dyad and Topside, as owners of the patents on the Ledas’ (and maybe the Castors’) DNA and the only ones monitoring them, control the medical information gleaned from the clones. And as we will see later in discussing patents, many companies have tried to control all the new genetic knowledge they acquired to maximize profits, and do not generally, or freely, share that knowledge with other companies.

SYNBIO AND JUSTICE IN THE REAL WORLD

In our world, things with SynBio overall are actually even more alarming than Orphan Black portrays, and certainly more than most people realize. Scenarios that used to be science fiction are now reality. A 2015 issue of WIRED magazine headlined the “Genesis Engine,” another name for CRISPR, a cheap, efficient, patented gene-editing method that lets almost any geneticist insert new genes into old organisms, allowing each to potentially change our natural world. With CRISPR, almost anyone with moderate training in genetics can do “garage bio” or “DIY bio,” so it will be almost impossible to regulate or control what genes are put into what organism.

New genetic sequencers have allowed scientists, within a decade, to jump from analyzing a billion base pairs per run to eighteen trillion base pairs per run. Nicknamed “Wonder Woman,” “Batman,” and “Electra,” these super-sequencers at places such as the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in tech-centric Huntsville, Alabama, also allow analysis, cell by cell, of what is occurring in the brain or immune system.

New biotechnology that uses such sequencers and CRISPR will affect the lives of billions of people, people who are unlikely to have a voice in decisions about which genes are inserted into what organisms and why, but who will disproportionately experience the impact of any disasters. A fundamental principle of justice is at stake here: When scientists experiment with the foundations of life in ways that potentially harm or benefit billions of people, how do we ensure a just outcome? The globalist perspective seems to leave 99 percent of people behind, with organizations like Topside in control.

The key to preventing this in our world is discussion among scientists themselves about how much technology like CRISPR should be allowed to be developed and used, rules around sharing results from that technology freely with journalists and citizens, and possible regulation by government agencies such as the FDA and the National Institutes of Health.

As for Orphan Black, it is important for experts outside the corrupt world of Dyad and Topside to have a look into the dealings of Projects Leda and Castor. Only through this can the clone sisters and brothers hope for salvation from the constant manipulation and objectification to which they are subject. Only in this way can the other 99 percent have a say in the future of humanity and the planet.